


Perfection of Flight

by Isagel



Category: 80 Days (Video Game 2014)
Genre: Multi, Threesome - F/F/M, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 05:46:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9058249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isagel/pseuds/Isagel
Summary: Boundaries of nature and of empires are there to be crossed. The sky is there to be shared.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [livrelibre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/livrelibre/gifts).



Maminirina doesn't sleep anymore, not like she slept when her human flesh was all she knew. When the night is clear, though, and her course is steady – no high winds to send her tumbling or currents in the air to pull her down – she sometimes drifts, her great copper body travelling the sky without her conscious effort, the way a migrating bird will sleep while flying, its wings beating through the night as its mind finds rest. She is aware in that half slumber of her engine heart pumping, of how the air hits her sails, but those things are distant, merely a surrounding reassurance that all is right, that nothing requires her thought. She feels as well, at such times, the weight and movement of those aboard her, of passengers and crew, calm in her knowledge of their being even as she dozes, dreams.

This night, then, resting and in flight above the Zulu coastline, she knows the stars and the moonlight and the warm breeze, and she senses, a tug in the back of her mind, when bare feet touch her wooden deck in the royal cabin, Queen Ranavalona and her emperor rising from their common bed. The ship is quiet around the two of them as they walk the corridors, no night-crew needed on a vessel that knows her own heading and keeps her own watch. 

Though there is light enough to see by, the queen trails her fingertips along the wall, and the touch is light and familiar, soothing. Many who understand her nature are afraid to touch the Maminirina, but Ranavalona and her betrothed are not among them. Far from it. Their hands on copper and wood are always deliberate, and it is easy to welcome them; slumbering, Maminirina feels them like a caress, like fingers stroking her hair. Most nights, she would take those caresses as encouragement to sleep deeper, to trust the safety of her existence. At first she does, tonight.

Then she realises where Ranavalona and Cetshwayo are heading, and she is, by the time they reach the engine room, quite awake enough to swing the door open for them before they can reach for the handle, to pull it shut behind them when they have crossed the threshold.

She opens her eyes, to see them, as humans do, face to face.

Ranavalona walks ahead. She is wearing no headdress, her hair falling in long thin braids over her bare shoulders. Her lamba is tied loosely with a knot above her breasts, deep-red fabric brushing the tops of her feet. A step behind, Cetshwayo’s hips are draped in the leopard skin that earlier that day had been his mantle, the golden hide that marks his royalty worn with the casualness of a man whose power requires no symbolism to be self-evident. They look, the two of them, like people who a few minutes ago were naked in bed and who are making no attempt to pretend otherwise. Their beauty is no less regal than when they are presiding on their thrones.

In days past, Maminirina would have knelt before her queen, before the ruler of the Zulu empire. She does not kneel now, for anyone. Her human body hangs here, suspended, locked into the interface between flesh and machine, and she could not bend to the ground if she wished it. She could bend her neck, of course, but she hasn't, not since she woke from anaesthesia with the tubes and cords in place and knew what she had become. They gave her this, queen and emperor; she isn't tied to them through subjection now, but through the vision they dared make real, the three of them.

She meets Cetshwayo’s eyes over Ranavalona’s shoulder.

“Captain,” he says. “My beloved wishes to fly with us.”

 _Oh._

Below them, taking off from the shoreline, her instruments pick them up – a flock of seagulls with a hundred beating wings rising towards them. But of course they aren't seagulls at all.

She smiles, and looks to the queen.

“I do,” Ranavalona says, “If you will take me.”

Maminirina reaches her hands out. The movement is slow, as all the motions of her organic limbs are, her muscles grown unused to them, her nervous system focused on controlling her automaton body. She is so much _more_ now than bone and sinew and flesh.

"Come," she says. 

The queen steps towards her, takes her hand. She entwines their fingers, comes so close their breasts brush together. Maminirina is all but naked, only the smallest cloth covering her genitals. More clothing would be useless, with all the wires passing through her skin in so many places, connecting her to the ship. Perhaps some younger version of her would feel embarrassment at being seen like this, but the being she is now finds it of no consequence. The people who walk her decks touch her copper skin every day, her hull basking naked under the sun. It is what she is.

The cotton of Ranavalona’s dress scrapes against her bare nipples, the queen’s thumb brushing her knuckles, stroking around the wiring that enters at her wrist. Maminirina raises her other hand to her queen’s temple, rests it deliberately at the point where no diamond shards are laid into her skull. Only bone and skin there, and she respects that decision, understands it, though she would never make it if she had the choice again, knows that Cetshwayo feels the same.

A single, indivisible mind the queen of Madagascar chose to remain. The iron will that stood between two colonial powers and turned them both away for the freedom of her people. The unique intellect that could envision something like this ship, this life form. The unparalleled brilliance and skill that worked to make it real, make Maminirina real. Ranavalona does not want that consciousness expanded into something new, as Maminirina was, or splintered into innumerable focal points, as Cetshwayo is. She is satisfied with the integrity of her own mind. Maminirina would not wish her otherwise.

But she can, when asked, offer a glimpse of another life, the life Ranavalona built for her.

She opens her consciousness, and pushes it through the points where they touch. Feels herself enter Ranavalona, feels Ranavalona's mind rush through her, along the conduits that are her expanded nervous system, out into the ship.

Ranavalona gasps, a sound of wonder and pleasure, as at a rare but familiar joy. She looks happy, and Maminirina can feel the reason, shares the sensations with her, moment to moment. The wind touching her everywhere, every metal inch of her hull caressed by it. The clarity and dizziness of height and the endlessness of the sky, the fire and pistons of her great engine roaring with the capacity for speed. The dozens of people sleeping inside her and her strength to hold them up and keep them safe. The guns she could fire to slay her enemies and the copper sails she could raise to rise higher, away from the conflicts of mankind. All of it beautiful, innumerable sensory impressions forming an experience of flight. 

Then Cetshwayo is there, with them in the sky. Gull’s wings obscuring the stars, silhouetted against the moon, a flock of birds all around them. Automaton birds, metal and wood, and in each their chests a single spinning diamond, shining in the night, every one a link to the diamond at Cetshwayo’s temple, inlaid bright into the deep black of his skin. The power to control grafted into his brain like it was into Maminirina’s, but used not to become a different self, but to send himself everywhere.

Every bird an extension of his mind and Ranavalona laughs to see them, delighted, makes the ship dance with them on the air, chasing their flight, letting them chase her. She’s clumsy in this great automaton body the way she would never be with an artificer’s tools in her own, but Maminirina steadies her movements, makes them graceful, easy, matching the strong wing strokes of Cetshwayo’s birds. There will come a time when they will all turn their own particular graces to the bloody choreography of battle, she’s known that since they chose to make her, African emperor and queen allied against white men’s hunger for land and wealth, forging a pilot into a weapon to control the skies. But now, here, there is only the joy of being these breathtaking, unnatural things that they are, the vertiginous perfection of flight.

Cetshwayo’s wings brush against her sails, a hundred wingtip caresses on her metal skin. Claws scratching copper like nails tracing flesh, counterpoints to warm human lips, Cetshwayo kissing the curve of Ranavalona's neck. The open link goes both ways. Maminirina can feel that touch, the heat and weight of the emperor’s hands on her queen’s body, just as Ranavalona feels his automaton caresses on hers. She doesn't miss it, that human physical contact, her own body is so seldom in her thoughts. She doesn't even know if it would register sexual pleasure, her slowly atrophying frame, it is so far now from what it was before. Like this, though, she feels Ranavalona’s skin as if it were her own, its every sensation vivid, exquisite.

Cetshwayo’s fingers undoing her lamba, his hands slipping down to cup her breasts as the cloth falls to the floor. His cock bared, long and hard against her backside, a current of air pressing on her rudder, wetness dripping between her thighs, her nipples tight between his fingers, an automaton beak sharp on her railing, gears and bellows working to keep her aflight, and always, from the first moment, the queen’s hand squeezing her own, not letting go.

She is two people in two bodies, making love to one man and to the vastness of the sky, and to the woman whose mind is in her body like she is inside her. 

They’re kissing, the queen cupping the back of her neck, palming the wires she once inserted there.

She is being fucked, Cetshwayo's cock thrusting deep into Ranavalona, dragging hard along the place that makes her writhe, makes her scream on every stroke.

She is flying. Sharing the heavens with these people who rule the land. Their wings are copper and blood, diamond and bone. Skin is not boundary enough to contain their minds.

She thinks together they could cross any boundary, whether drawn by nature or by empires on a map.

She knows when her queen asks, she won't say no.


End file.
